The Virgo New Moon: The Fungus In My Nails and Giving In to the Details

The Virgo New Moon

Early tomorrow morning, the moon wanes to darkness in Virgo. Here, summer blusters out in a rain storm and I am getting ready to return to the classroom.

Virgo asks us to get real. Are my toes aligned? Do my fingers add up? All the small details of life can feel difficult and disorderly unless we let them fall into place and align.

I haven’t written a cosmic blog post in almost a year! It’s the rain storm that stopped me from rushing home. I got a too-sweet milky tea and a lemon bar in the cafe down the street and I’m sitting in my Flower Essence studio waiting it out, after a day of in-service, meetings and various levels of fear, collaboration, anxiety, sharing and planning.

New Moon Intentions & Messages

Yes, I do have a Flower Essence studio now! Did I last November? I think I was just moving in. I now have a place to see people in person for a Flower Essence consultation, if they are in northern Vermont, and a place to go to write and sit and just be. I don’t come as often as I would like, but a good New Moon intention for me would be to come more often, and to write.

The lesson of this New Moon came to me as I was walking through the door of the building that my studio is in:

“Feel into the way things are, not the way you want them to be”.

Just as the pesky details of life can feel like too much to handle at times, sometimes these very same details can remind us of the contours of a reality that we may be struggling against or denying.

Listening to the Details

As my lack of blog updates suggests, becoming a high school teacher has been filled with many, many pesky details that I never quite feel able to control or manage. My lesson plans, the kids in my class, their needs, my needs. Then there was my wedding: the planning, the people, the flowers, the venues, the vendors, the invites. I never thought I’d do either thing, teach in high school or plan a wedding, but I guess this is where the details wanted me to be.

All last year I was struggling to catch up with myself. Then Summer came and I breathed out. Now, before I begin again, I need to consider what I learned from last year. I am going to ask my students the same thing. We could all journal on it for the New Moon. What did we learn from where we have been?

Fingernail Fungus

My nails clue me in. For about a year I have had what I thought were nail problems on my hands due to gardening. My nails were always dirty and a bit smelly and strange. I tried cleaning them. I got nifty manicures that my teenage students gave me compliments on. This may not have been a good thing, since the last time I went, just to remove a gel manicure I didn’t want anymore, the manicurist, a beautiful woman from Kazakhstan, told me that I have nail fungus, in all my nails! And apparently you can catch it from nail salons. She’d never seen it so bad. How embarrassing. I was shocked and dismayed, but also relieved to finally have a diagnosis. I must have been exposed to it somehow, I think probably in the shared gloves I wore when I worked on the farm a few years ago.

Wedding Bands, a little bird and Fingernail Fungus!

My manicurist was not optimistic. The treatment will be long she said. It might never go away. I’ve been soaking with Epsom salts and apple cider vinegar, applying tea tree and oregano essential oils, diluted in oil of course, and putting my finger tips in lemons, following the advice she gave me, and waiting to see what happens.

I also got curious.

I’ve always been rather vain about my hands, fingers and nails. They taper elegantly and my nails were always short but strong. I liked them. I remember feeling so dismayed when they started to look strange. But I ignored it. Maybe it was just age? I should have paid attention to the details.

Since my diagnosis, I have been looking for the meaning of this particular ailment. Apparently it is pretty common. I like to use Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life book for the metaphysical meaning of symptoms.

For her, what do the fingers symbolize? The details of life. The hands, grasping, holding things. Fungus represents stagnating beliefs and a refusal to release the past, letting the past rule today. The nails represent protection. Putting all of this together, my ugly nails teach me a lesson. With all the changes in my life, I have struggled to release what I no longer need (funnily enough, I will have a yard sale this weekend, the third one this summer, so I can still keep practicing that one). In the past, fear ruled my life, but it no longer needs to. I can work with some new beliefs, which I know from experience will help my fingernails heal when used in conjunction with the physical treatments I am working with.

I am safe. I can protect myself. I am protected.

I take care of the details of my life without worrying and comparing, wondering and stressing. The devil is only in the details if I allow him to sit there and grin at me.

I see that wanting things to be different than they are causes me more worry and stress. Instead, I can step into my current reality like a new dress. The Moon helps.

The Desire for Perfection

When I think of Virgo, I also think of the desire for perfection. Virgo is an Earth sign, and she wants things completed and whole. I have always struggled with wanting things to be perfect. I never feel I can attain perfection, in anything I do. I remember, as a child in school in Switzerland, a country of perfection if ever there was one, when a teacher asked me to draw the other side of a photographed face. My side came nowhere near reflecting the original. I also feel that I can never reproduce something I have done in exactly the same way. I am messy and my life never looks like perfection, even on the channels that are supposed to manufacture it. What if my desire for perfection was already satisfied? The Virgin is whole and perfect because she is the way she is. She doesn’t have to do anything.

Enjoy this precise Virgo energy, your harvests and the beginning of fall!

Are you interested in tuning into the natural cycles and the plant spirits to tend to your life’s details? You can book an exploratory call with me or schedule a flower essence consultation by booking on my website or reaching out to me.

I’ll write again soon!

Have a beautiful New Moon!

Amy

Activate Your Desires: A New Moon Party in Aquarius

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

An Offering of Home
Getting in the bath tonight to receive my New Moon message felt like going home. I haven’t shared news with you in so long. I feel detached and I’ve felt detached from myself and from others, how very Aquarian. But that is not really me. As a late decan Pisces with my ascendant at the very end of Scorpio, this New Moon falls in my fourth house of home and I came home to myself. How do I want to share it with others? I have been cultivating my offerings, waiting for them to bloom in their own time. That time is not now, with snow laying all around. The seeds are still slumbering. But I am showing up with an offering.

A Planetary Party
The Moon and the Sun aren’t the only cosmic objects gathering in Aquarius. You can find Jupiter conjunct Venus there, making out on the couch. Mercury is doing back flips off the arm chair while Saturn sulks in the corner. I’m not sure I’d want to be there.

Welcome Back to High School
Teaching teenagers in rural high schools brings me closer to the underbelly of our society, the one we don’t see on TV. I observe how we are raising the children who will carry the world in the future. I find it terrifying at times. My mind spins. How can I bring something to them, these young people who so often already seem brokien by a system that doesn’t do them justice, that constructs machines around them and then teaches them to consume so that it can consume them? The situation seems dire, and I read and overhear despair from others who teach them and from those who look to the stars. The Aquarian Age has not lived up to the youthful hopes and revolutions of the past.

Activate Your Desires
What can I do? In the bath a message to share came to me: Activate your desires. What does this mean concretely? I shine a light on the dark places I observe and ask my students, directly and indirectly, what do you desire? Most of them do not desire to learn French. They don’t desire to be in school. Today a student I passed in the hall asked me what my problem was. He thought I was staring. Sometimes I feel they don’t want me there, they don’t want to be seen at all, let alone be asked about their desires. What then? I speak to my own desires. Even the small ones deserve my attention - a square of chocolate, a cup of tea. One small, conscious desire equals many large diffuse desires or endless cravings for “other” and “more”. My big desires often rhyme with my fears, so I approach them gingerly and lovingly. I take my time.

The Queen of Wands
Today I drew the Queen of Wands in my daily tarot pull. This card is the card of my Sun’s position and always speaks to me of myself - Water of Fire - all opposite of the Air energies surrounding the moon and most of the rest of the cosmos. The current alignments are rare. I was in a muddle all day with what to do with all the mental energy, but the Queen helped me. In the bath I got it: Activate your desires.

The world is only as you want it to be, as you allow it to be, as you see it and allow it to be seen.

So speak to your desires.

Plant Wisdom
The plants teach me to speak to my desire in the moment, most often my desires, however unbeknownst to me, are formulated at the seed or cellular level to encourage my growth. Ah, the sleeping seeds now getting ready to burst under the snow, teach me that I don’t have far to go to allow the seeds of myself to prepare for the new growing season. How do I want to grow?

And it may seem like we do not have a lot of choice in the matter. I too have felt weighed down by the events of the past year, the illness, death and blindness of our society as we continue to run towards our own demise. And I could get caught up in the blur of whirring cogs in my brain, each planet spinning in air, but I stop myself there.

Maybe no one can tell me what to do. Others don’t have the answer and they can’t show me the path to where I want to go. Maybe I simply need to activate my own desires, and when I think this or write this an energy comes, despite the snow. We are buried for a little while longer I think, and I don’t need the world to conform to me, I simply need to let it flow, let the chaos be the chaos and work itself out.

A Pleiadian Message
The stars gave me this message last month, at the time of the violence in Washington, before Biden’s inauguration. I was listening to star song on my walk down the hill, specifically the Pleiades. It was my homework in a class I am taking with Jocelyn Mercado, Music of the Spheres, to connect with them specifically. As a singer of traditional harmonies and a student of the Middle Ages, celestial song never feels far from my conscience, but deciding to listen to specific constellations has brought me great insight, especially from the stories they carry. The Pleiades said, those sacred sisters, let the chaos flow and settle, work itself out. Another way of saying let go. I think that is what all this Aquarian energy asks of us too. Let it flow, go, all of the mess of the world, and I add, as the Queen of Wands, I’ll activate my desires, as seed children in my womb, and act on them. That’s what I’ll plant at this New Moon, my desires, for the kind of world I want to be in, for the protection and safe growth of the planet and the children.

Your Desires
How are your desires? Would you like to listen in? The plants can help. I offer flower essences, flower essence consultations, tarot readings and astrological conversations on your star chart and your aspirations. I also have a few spots for long term coaching if you’d like to engage with your desires as a creative process of growth with the help of the green world around you. Well, it will be green soon. Make a free appointment to discuss this work with me here.

Stay warm star children! Let me know how you activate your desires!

Love,

Amy

Plants Have No Past: Plant Wisdom for 2021

Showing up for the plants
I haven’t written a cosmic blog post since September and the New Moon in Virgo. Since then, I’ve had many new beginnings. At Halloween, the Celtic New Year, I got engaged. A few weeks later I started a full time French teaching job in two local public high schools. Since then I have been adjusting to this radical shift in my use of energy! No more endless days to contemplate my next steps as an entrepreneur! Time to tackle that lethargy that has kept me away from my goals! Teaching and a full time job was, ironically, perhaps exactly what I needed to take my online business more seriously. Here I am, showing up for the plants, after a few months of intense adaptation to my new role in the outer world.

Reassessing self-care
My work with plants has been on the back burner, but I’ve felt them with me and had some beautiful experiences and conversations with the people I’m working with. I’ve also had to radically reassess my well-being and how I manage stress. I’ve had to make some changes in what I eat and drink and how, and the plants have helped me along the way. Most of all, I’ve had to reconnect again and again with my inner knowing of what is best for me. I think this is necessary for everyone amidst rapid and profound change, and we have all been experiencing that.

Wondering at the New Moon
And now, this New Moon in Capricorn! The first of the year! Conjunct Pluto! I have been feeling the heaviness of the Capricorn moon for a few days. When the moon traverses Capricorn, this is my least favorite moment of the lunar cycle, whether waxing or waning. I feel heavy and burdened, and the smallest things annoy me. I’ve been journaling a lot, and feeling and wondering where this year is headed, for me, for others.

Watching Giants Collide
Cosmically, we have seen huge encounters, shifts and movement. At the Solstice, Saturn met Jupiter in what is known as the Great Conjunction. I didn’t get to see the encounter on that day because of cloud cover, but I watched their approach to one another on the days before. As you may have heard, this encounter in Aquarius marks the beginning of a new era which I think we all feel we sorely need. Aquarius will bring some air to Saturn’s heavy convictions, allowing us all to innovate in order to make the world a better place for ourselves and others. Right now this probably did not feel particularly airy and light, however. In November, Pluto was conjunct the two giants, for the third time, and Mars joined in as well, squaring Pluto three times this past year (I made a special flower essence to mitigate the influences of this particularly sticky alignment - Dark Hollyhock!).

Melting Beeswax
Today I’m writing from a snowstorm, as I melt beeswax and put away the Christmas decorations. The mice have taken on my sugar addiction, so I’m cleaning up after them too. The shell of a green Hershey’s kiss. A chewed open packet of Swiss Miss. We will all be cutting back on sugar in the coming months. I’ll be drinking and communicating with Cedar, part of our monthly devotion in the WEALTH community, that, as usual (synchronicity!) fits well with my current desires. I wonder what Cedar will tell me. I’ll be able to tell you about it at the Full Moon. I am also connecting more with the stars with a coach of mine Jocelyn Mercado, and her course The Music of the Spheres. Yesterday, walking down my cold hill in the dark, they told me to trust the process as the current chaos unfolds. Trust the process to see what comes, for better things will rise, though it seems impossible sometimes. Courage!

Listening to Plant Wisdom
The last strong plant wisdom I got in 2020 was that plants don’t have a past. I was in the bath. It was at the Full Moon eclipse in Gemini in November. I saw the plants all around me, supporting me. The flowers showed me how they don’t have to release the past because, in fact, they have no past. They grow from seed, always present in the moment of growth. Their energy is always at their growth points. They are always growing in the now. They have one growing cycle, then down and around again. They don’t shed skin as we do. As I write, I realize trees have a past. They shed their skin, but perhaps that is why we have an easier affinity with them. Flowers say, live for the day. This realization helped me move gently into change, for what am I, if not constant growth and change?

Taking a Ritual Bath
Though the New Moon is now slightly past, might I suggest a ritual bath for digging up and integrating the past? As you run the bath, think of all the bits of you that you want to slough off. Plant them in the water of the bath, like the ash of an Alchemical process. After 20 minutes or so, let the water run out, imagining that you, having dissolved them, you are releasing them. Your past has vanished, and you rise from the bath tub like some strange plant, new to the world, feeding off of air.

Dissolving into the Air
If you feel some fear at dissolving, at seeing your false sense of self drop away to reveal your inner, green, shining core, I’ve just posted a new Flower Essence up in my shop for you, White Foxglove. This beautiful shadow essence eases the way for us on our shadow path, allowing us to disperse, be everywhere, and find that the answer to our fear resides in the expansiveness of our imagination.

I wish you great expansion during this time of great change. Be light on yourselves!

Love,

Amy

P.S. I have a few spots open for one on one creative coaching with the flowers. You can make an appointment for an exploratory session with me here. I’m also offering some flower essence consultations if you would like me to make a blend for you. You may also browse the essences in my shop (and shadow shop). I also will soon have some exciting news about some new blends that will be available soon on a beautifully curated platform for healing products from Vermont! Stay tuned!

The Beans Inside: Finding Inner Peace with the New Moon in Virgo

Beautiful heirloom runner bean blossoms - Scarlet Emperor - will turn to magical, large purple-black beans in long hairy pods.

This New Moon in Virgo had me in quarantine. I got to go back for one afternoon to my garden, gather some squash, check on the blossoms and the beans before returning to my partner’s house where we were sheltering from the world in case we had the dreaded virus. I felt a little trapped. My own sovereign maiden of autumn did not feel resplendent in colorful leaves. She felt a bit imprisoned. The news came pouring in like so many gusts of ill-fated wind. I couldn’t do anything and I felt nervous at every unnecessary interaction. I found it hard to relax, though I had all the time in the world and all of my needs were being met.

On the day of the New Moon, I played the role of the grumpy maiden. I could not see clearly enough to write my lunar download, but I did take a bath and I did sit in some mists which ultimately lifted, or are lifting, on my way to composure and peace. How are you currently finding peace?

Mars Square Saturn and Pluto
Mars is currently retrograde, moving backwards towards ever closer squares with Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn. These aspects were trine the New Moon. A trine is a gentle aspect, and this one probably shed a gentle shadow on how the Mars Retrograde square might be affecting you. I hope you had the time to reflect on this and see behind the veil you may have felt with this New Moon. I have felt the Mars/Pluto square generally as a kind of ennui; j’en ai marre, you would say in French. A fed-upness with the way things are yet an inability and an unwillingness to take action. This has forced me to consider my own patterns of self-sabotage and unwillingness to seek help or take advice. I’ve focused on finding enjoyment in this feeling of stuckness. A few weeks ago, when the Mars/Pluto square was first exact, I made a Hollyhock flower essence which helps me see these patterns of resistance to positive action in myself and in others.

Hollyhock Flower Essence, made especially for the Mars/Pluto square, up in my shop soon.

How am I getting mired in shadow? What do I need to do to move forwards? How can I help others? As usual, the flower brings clarity when I take this flower essence - I’ve taken it as I write this! Let me know if you would like some to work with during this transit.

Heavier and Heavier
Mars square Saturn bares down on us heavily as well, maybe even more so since the planet Saturn is closer to our Sun. We will feel this pressure through October. It’s been a while since I’ve focused on my own Saturn work, necessary work I think for all those of us incarnated here in the material. Saturn represents Time and reminds us of our limits. We can work with him by developing a pattern to our activities. Lately though I have felt like I don’t want to be too strict with what I require of myself. Saturn stifles Mars’ natural energy for action. How can I work with my limitations in an encouraging way?

Inner Child Work
Lately a new friend in a tarot session suggested that I touch base more often with my inner child, to make sure she feels okay about the actions I am taking (the session was lovely! Thank you Holly! Find her on Instagram @rainbow.time.apothecary). Maybe I can temper a conflicted Saturn, who feels somewhat bound in Capricorn, with my childishness, with playfulness? Maybe I can add variety to my days, even if I am stuck at home or limited because I need to make money in certain ways. Maybe I can just approach my whole life more playfully, as a game I must play. I can follow the rules of course, one must, but I can also take pleasure when pleasure becomes available, or make my daily grind pleasurable by perceiving it that way.

Change Within Change
So much change reverberates right now through the world, and within this we find ourselves in a season of change. Summer cools and fades to Autumn. I recently learned that the colonizers of the “new world”, which we now call New England, renamed Autumn “Fall” because the leaves fall, and they do, dramatically. Currently they are just beginning to blush to red. Fire lights the trees. In the West, fires are still burning, in brighter colors, more alive, ushering in rapid change. This feels painful, like molting skins in a molten land. I think anyone who feels connected to the land feels this too. I want to trust the Earth and where we are all going, but I feel raw and stripped, with not much to hold on to. I think of the seeds that will grow, their hard casings released by fire, and know that this season fills a necessary role in our planetary evolution. We just have to tow the line. And harvest. We must harvest.

Harvesting Beans
As I sat down to write today, a day after the New Moon in Virgo when she is already waxing in Libra, I thought of the peas in their pods, of the purple pole beans that are still growing and swelling outside on their vines. They are still flowering, offering their small red cushions to the bees. I sit writing in a careful, protected space I made during these indoor days, a place to write and read and knit and meditate. We all need this kind of inner sanctum. I know how to build one no matter where I am because I built one in my own breast. Just like the beans that are still swelling in their envelopes, we need to build ourselves safe spaces in which our seeds may grow.

Inner Work, Inner Peace
Summer teaches us how express ourselves while winter teaches us how to move inside. From here, we can observe ourselves, our mental make up, our neuronal connections, and decide which ones to favor and which ones to lay aside. We can also play with them and change them! In June I joined an online community called WEALTH, run by Caroline Elliot and her husband. I learned an amazing and enjoyable form of shadow integration from Carolyn called Existential Kink. She has written a book on the topic and started this community for other thought leaders who want to work with inner alchemy to change themselves and ultimately the world. I highly recommend getting involved if you want a wonderful platform and new friends to play with. You can apply to join now. This kind of inner work, no matter the situation you may find yourself in, brings a sense of inner peace because it teaches you how to, step by step, embrace all your inner shadows, all the little complex beans and seeds that line your being. I can just do the work and watch them swell. I don’t need to stress about outcome, I just know that the more I plant myself, the stronger and more true to myself I will become.

If you enjoyed this essay and want to know more about my work, make a free appointment with me today. I help people who grieve their lost Earth connection find their creative flow again.
You can download my free guide to plant communication here.

Going Green: A Second New Moon in Cancer

A Second New Moon in Cancer
Yesterday’s New Moon was a rare occurrence. Called a Black Moon, it was the second one to fall in Cancer, where the Sun currently sits. This happens every few years, and is a kind of recalibration, a shift in axis, one astrologer called it. It means that the next New Moon will also be at the end of a zodiacal sign. So we had a second New Moon at the very end of Cancer season, as we are about to roll into hot Leo, where we will feel more energized and extroverted. Cancer season was about turning inside. We wanted to stay home and tend to the home, we wanted to be intimate with ourselves and others. We wanted to nurture. We also may have wanted to put up a strong barrier, the armor of the crab.

Sitting With Paradox
So right now we sit on several paradoxes: a Cancer New Moon on the cusp of Leo, a tender new start at the end of a season, an inward looking soft gaze ready to defend itself at the slightest disturbance. We get a second chance to observe these oppositions and consider where we find ourselves on the Cancer - Capricorn spectrum. How soft or hard do we need to be? How can we be a bit of both?

At Home
The Moon is at home in Cancer, and I think we know where we need to go, but there is more work to be done. Yesterday when I meditated with the Moon, I received quite a strong message about the necessary changes that are being asked of us now, as humans, and what it means to become “green”. Certainly we know what actions we should take. There are life style changes we need to make, and the Corona Virus pandemic has spurred us along in making these changes. We have traveled less, recycled more, consumed less and reduced the need to produce all kinds of things (masks not included). We have driven less and the Earth, I think, has breathed a sigh of relief at quieter seas and gentler human activity. Our economy has taken a toll, but we always knew that this was necessary in some way I think, and we are learning to be resilient. We are helping each other more, and simultaneously tending more to our green Earth.

Being Green
So in many ways I see the drastic events of the last few months as having precipitated us into being more aligned with the Earth. What else can we do to be green? We can follow the advice of organizations like Green America as to which companies to buy from. We can take it one step further, live off grid, go solar, eat local. Some people think it is green to stop eating meat and we can do that. Some people say it is better to return to traditional ways of farming, and we can do that. We can choose not to have kids. I’m a proponent of these last two choices. We can support legislators that make environmentally friendly laws. We can use our power as voting citizens and consumers. But how much power do we have?

The Way of the Machine
I think in general we still want to believe that we can keep living the way we live and be green. We can use electric cars or live in ecologically safe houses and not change our lives too much, but I’m not sure this is true. It seems that we are still going the Way of the Machine, not the Way of Life, and that we are still looking for ways that technology can save us, but I don’t think it will.

Plant Lessons
Since the beginning of my plant journey, becoming green has been a big theme. In one of my first meditations with a plant ally, I literally was gifted the experience of being a plant. This changed my perspective on a lot of things, as you can imagine. I started to see plants as having something to teach us about how to simply be on the Earth. So what do they have to say about going green?

The Way of Life
In Vermont, it becomes green all at once, in a rush. The growing season is short, and so the green season is quite remarkable, dense and a bit overwhelming. The bugs are frantic at my bright window at night and there can be a feeling of overgrowth, of too much. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about society’s current relationship to the green realm as something that is “too much”. We want to grow mono-crops. We want yards free of weeds. We seem to want to pave over large areas of living Earth. We seem to want exactly the opposite of what nature wants. Nature wants abundance, and fulfills this desire abundantly, while we seem to want the opposite of diversity. We think abundance resides in reducing that which survives, in making it so that only we can thrive. But this logic is antithetical to life.

Systemic Change
What these thoughts tell me is that the current planetary situation isn’t asking of us small, incremental changes that will preserve the status quo but wide, systemic changes that will mean we will step on the world differently. We will walk more slowly. We will walk more, we will rely less on a dying system that is bleeding the natural world. We need to change quickly.

Going Green
So my New Moon intentions this month have to do with taking concrete action for creating a new world order which is based on Green Abundance not Mechanical Lack.

Going green isn’t NOT doing something, it is positively doing new things, taking new actions that actively create another kind of world.

Going green is living from the heart.

Green is the color of the heart chakra and reminds me of the way everything in the green world hums together, breaths together, lives and dies together.

Be more green.

If plants don’t speak to you, think of Kermit and be more like an amphibian. Consider the harm your actions cause, from a heart perspective.

From the perspective of your heart, consider what kinds of actions would create a different kind of world, one that is heart-centered.

Think with your heart.

This might mean we each have to do our share of healing, but we already knew this and now is not the time to shy away from whatever mess you find within and without.

We need to crawl out of our old armor and meet the world bare and pink so that the powers that be don’t know what to do any more, like the woman in Portland who faced down the militarized police naked. Make them laugh, make them crumble.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-19/portland-protest-naked-athena

While I was making a flower essence yesterday, one expressly for the Saturn/Sun opposition we were experiencing with this New Moon, I saw a pink beetle crawling away from its dark armor, left on a dying leaf. The beetle-like police will look silly eventually next to the heart-centered warriors besides them, whether at Standing Rock or in cities around the world. Green can’t lose, green wins, and though we must embrace deep inner and outer change, the plants can help us. And we can help each other.

Let me know if you are interested in talking with me about strategies to help yourself “go green”! You can make a free appointment here. I love this work and for me there is no stronger call than to help people become more heart-centered and Earth connected so that we can change the world we live in.

Lots of green love,

Amy

A Daisy Crown for the Sun: The Solstice and a New Moon Eclipse in Cancer

A Wild Garden
As I’m writing this, the Moon is still in Cancer, taking me into a cool evening after a hot day. The garden has exploded in a typical Vermont way. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking, won’t it be nice when the leaves are on the trees, and suddenly, everything is green. The ground nut and other vines have strangled the poppies and I’m rescuing peonies from the rain. I’ve let the garden go wild, with just a bit of space cleared around my vegetables patches. I’m watching the three sisters grow, my dream of planting an indigenous garden here a reality. In May, my then very new love and I planted mounds of corn, peas, beans and squash. Since then I’ve been watching all of us reach into an intertwined life; a nice parallel between my green garden and my growing relationship. The pea plants found the corn without any help and now there is a single purple pea flower on one of them. They don’t seem to mind the heat. I think to water, and then see that they are doing fine. I weed the carrots. The lilacs have bloomed and the wild phlox, feeding what seemed like hundreds of swallowtail butterflies. I could take lots of pictures of irises, foxglove and the tangle of blackberry bramble and strawberry and blueberry bush which, in addition to feeding the birds, I hope will give me some fruit. In the morning, the bumblebees roll in the rosa rugosa blooms that grow up the side of the house. I’ve planted sun flowers. I feel thankful for this abundance and my life in my hot little house. I’ve started making sourdough bread.

A practice shot - the actual ceremony was not photographed. Photo by A. Blackhawk

The Summer Solstice
On the day before the Solstice, I went and greeted the Sun as a lover and made a daisy chain crown that I imagined I placed on his head, reflecting on how the flower is like a small sun, a miniature representation of a cosmic force we can only observe in awe. The Sun is reflected in the daisy, yellow center surround by rays of light, the circle which rays out. I made two round solstice loaves, a Sun and a Moon, and on the day of the Solstice, one which we brought to an Abenaki Fire Shooting ceremony which was magical even with masks and social distancing. There, someone shot an arrow into the Sun, and we gathered and talked as people must have done here long before there were lawns and strip malls. It feels good to give back this way to the land. I think it recognizes us, some of our words, songs and actions, and feels relieved that there is still ceremony as the sun moves from the longest day back towards eventual longer nights. At the Solstice, the Earth starts to breath out. I am reminded that blooming is brief and takes the effort of many, but when it is time, blooming is divine. The Sun says, every day is divine. The herbs gather me now - it was traditional to gather yarrow at the Solstice, but here it is not yet blooming - I gather clover and roses. On my walk to greet the Sun, a hawthorn bush peeked at me through the hedge, its blooms already swelling towards berry. The small green apples are hard and seem to blow up a little more everyday. Like the Sun, the daily dawn chorus is also divine. The peepers are done and the birds have the early hours to themselves, greeting the day with a jungle of sounds. When the Sun is up it calms, with only the sounds of the news of the day, warnings or cheers, preparing for heat. The mornings are wet and cool. I go for barefoot garden walks.

Self-representation
As I write these words that describe my green days, I wonder if it is okay that I am not visually documenting my life. I haven’t wanted to. I needed a break from social media. Things were changing for me in the Spring and I needed to rethink how I was representing myself. I needed to consider why my posts weren’t growing my audience in the way I wanted them to and which part of me wanted to be ignored. I decided to take myself out of the game while Venus retrograded in Gemini, leaving the night sky too. Five planets are now retrograde, including Mercury, so a turn to inner work seems appropriate. I have enjoyed the pause and not getting lost in the Instragram scroll. This also coincided with the feeling that other voices needed to be heard more urgently and it felt appropriate to step back a little because of that too. I understand a little better why it is hard for me to show up there, and to show up with my business in general, so I think I will come back with more consciousness around what and how I am sharing, and hopefully less self-sabotage. I was interviewed for a podcast (coming soon!) and I’m going to take a course by the wonderful Sabrina Monarch called Online Presence as Performance Art (!) and Venus moves forward again on Thursday, so hopefully my time away from the scene will allow me to infuse my online presence with a new energy. Maybe I am moving into being more comfortable being seen. This has been the focus of my magic for a while. This New Moon in Cancer has me wondering how I am showing up for myself. Is it with compassion and trust? I want to show up like that for the people in my life as well as in public, but how can I if I don’t show up that way for myself? The Eclipse, and end and a beginning, adds drama to the question of how I’m being seen and how I see myself, while Cancer makes it all more emotional. I’m aware of how my words do or do not adequately represent my inner, watery worlds. I want something new, in any case, and I’m working on it. I’m starting by opening my eyes and ears to myself. The outside world gives me keys to how best to see myself.

Being seen
As I turned into my garage tonight, I saw a doe and her fawn walking up the road. they stopped to stare and then ran, tails wagging. We saved a baby phoebe; it was flopping on the grass and I placed it gingerly back into its nest. The mother still doesn’t trust me though, every time I go check she flies back and forth peeping at me. I wonder if she knows she owes one of her babies’ lives to me. There are five little birds crowded in there, no wonder one fell. It must be hot. They don’t mind that I come peer at them. They don’t mind being seen. The mice in my house too give me clues to how compassionate I can be to myself. If I can live with them, I can live with my own fragile truths. I can put this out into the world and they become less fragile, more firm. How comfortable are you sharing your magic? I’d love to help you work on your visibility, as I work on mine. Do you want to share more of yourself but wonder how? Make a free appointment with me on my homepage. I’m currently only available Thursday afternoon and on the weekends. Contact me if you need to arrange another time or send me an email describing the kind of work you want to put out into the world and why you struggle to do so. A good flower essence for self-expression is Self Heal. You can buy some here.

Solstice blessings to you all. I hope you feel the wild potential in these painful times. The veils are lifting and shifting. Be kind to yourselves!

Love,

Amy

My wild garden

No Such Thing As Disconnection: The Gemini New Moon and a Message from Valerian

Wild Valierian - From Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis

A New Moon Harvest
This long weekend, I took a little more time to get my New Moon download than usual. Now it is already Wednesday and the moon is a swelling crescent in the sky. I harvested Valerian on Friday, when the New Moon was exact, and my house is filled with the smell of drying leaves. The root, white and tangled, smelled pungent and ripe like Spring. Some people hate how it smells. I loved it, and loved harvesting it. Let us know over at Flack Family Farm if you would like some! You can also just email me. Valerian is wonderful for sleep and relaxation, perfect for these anxious times. In my last post, I talked about how she helps us see the connections between the dark and the light. This week she teaches us how to heal our disconnection from the Earth.

A particularly beautiful Valerian root - you can order some from me or Flack Family Farm

Venus Retrograde in Gemini
Since Venus retrograded in Gemini, I have been social distancing from social media, contemplating how I want it to serve me instead of feeling like a slave to it, and I feel like as a result it is taking me a little more time to know how to share what I want to share. Venus is in her dark phase, no longer in the night sky, completing her 8-year-long flower dance, and like her, I wanted to delve into the darkness of my own sky, to see what there is behind the veil, and disappear for a while.

A Planetary Download
To get my cosmic insight, I took a bath just as the New Moon was exact. I actually took two baths for this one (baths are my grounding portals of planetary intuition - make an appointment with me to talk about how you can tune in!), one the day before, with salts, and one with my Valerian harvest. What came up for me was the theme of disconnection. Choosing to disconnect from the internet may be a way of coming back to ourselves, to draw ourselves within, and this has been particularly necessary at this time of social distancing. Meanwhile, disconnection is another type of pandemic, one perhaps more damaging to our world than the virus itself. Disconnection could be at the root of its spread. How did we forget, in our race to be more connected, the life-giving connections that sustain us, to the water and land, to the plants and the animals around us? When did we forget the care that is necessary to maintain them?

Disconnection
I believe that disconnection is fundamentally an ecological problem. That is to say, because we are disconnected from the Earth - as humans we experienced at some point in our long history the Earth as hostile to us and survival as a challenge - all other disconnection followed. The patriarchy arose, and we became disconnected from the Earth, from the feminine, outside of us and inside of us as well. We reject parts of ourselves, and disconnect from them. We disconnect from feelings, feel overwhelmed by them, and are no longer able to process them in the body. We disconnect from the body. We don’t want to feel the suffering of the past, in our own lives and in the lives of others. We experience “species loneliness”, which Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. As a society of the industrialized variety, we no longer feel connected to beings outside of our own species. I remember the feeling when I first starting working more intimately with plants that I was never alone. My loneliness disappeared. I was surrounded by an abundance of green friends.

Gemini Energy
Gemini is an energy I am familiar with because my natal moon is in Gemini. I want to learn a lot, I want to do everything. I don’t want to focus. You could call it the attention deficit disorder sign, and though I’ve never been diagnosed with that “disorder”, I do relate to how the brain functions with a multitude of sensory inputs. This Gemini energy can make me feel disconnected, with too many choices, and too many things I want to do. I am curious and a fast learner, but I can get overwhelmed by all there is I want to know. This New Moon was illuminating this energy for me. Mercury is also in Gemini, where it was conjunct Venus last week. My mind rattles with questions. What do I want to do? How will I choose? Why am I doing what I am doing? Disconnection is also a mental energy. We disconnect when we activate our rational faculties, when we analyze, when we ponder. And I wonder, do we have to? Is there another way of thinking that doesn’t disconnect but connects?

A Pandemic
Within the context of our current pandemic, many of us have disconnected from our routines, our daily lives of hustle and bustle. I was already pretty disconnected from this mode of living, and I don’t think I could go back to it, but not everyone can choose to do anything else, and this is part of the problem. Our current workaholic world of disconnection is the norm, a fait accompli, without which the economy and the society it feeds would crumble, or so many believe. What are our options? Throw out your TV? Get off the grid? Go local, local, local, that is what the books I am reading say and have been saying for years (see Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy or David Fleming’s Surviving the Future), and I see the signposts in my immediate surroundings too, in a sign in my small town telling us to stay safe and buy local; in the the way people are leaving free stuff out everywhere instead of having yard sales; in those giving away masks and making sure their neighbors have enough to eat. We need to learn how to grow our own food and eat the food at our doorsteps. We need to help and support each other. These changes are now happening in real time, and that must be how we change the larger paradigm. These are my Gemini thoughts, like so many shivering, shaking leaves.

A bath with Valerian

A Bath With Valerian
In my second bath, with Valerian, I asked the spirit of the plant about disconnection. It showed me a bed. There is nothing you need to do to feel connection in this time of separation, it said, except for to allow yourself to pass through the veil, to sleep, to feel your connection to everything that is outside of yourself, to feel connected to the non-human realms. Perhaps this is the ideal time to do so, to acknowledge all that surrounds us, in the dream time and in the forest, in the park and down the street, in the square of grass (for more on this listen to this recent David Abrams essay on the Emergence podcast).

Heart Thinking
Later I felt into the fact that often my feelings of frustration, of longing, of separation, come from my feeling of disconnection. In other words, I wouldn’t feel frustrated if I felt connected and remembered that I am always connected. What kind of thinking allows me to remember this? I feel this when my thinking is not just mental but heart-centered. Some say the heart thinks too, some argue only the brain thinks, but whatever science decides, I know that my understanding grows along with my capacity to use both in my daily life. My feeling of connection is only as expansive as the size of my own heart.

An Expansive Heart
Lately my heart has been expanding. Venus’ dance has brought to me a unique experience of love and balance, and that is what I am seeding with this New Moon, balance between the heart and the brain, the masculine and the feminine. I am reminded of how potently the world can reflect our own cycles of healing and growth, and that we are not separate from the Earth. She is always reminding us.

As long as we see the earth as something other than ourselves, we forget that Gaia herself is conscious and intelligent, carrying the instructions we need for restoration and healing, for creating a human presence here on earth in service to all life. - Chameli Ardagh

How do you get connected when you feel disconnection? Write to me, I’d love to know! I’m observing, loving and releasing doubts about my purpose and self-worth and moving beyond the idea of disconnection in my head and my heart, thanks to the flowers.

If you’d like to discover how flower essences might help you do the same, make an appointment with me here. With a flower essence consultation, you will receive your own personal essence, but you can also browse my flower essences and their beautiful messages here.

During this cycle the plants helped me understand that as we live sometimes in duality, we may find ways of embracing our polarities and those around us or in others. For another good read on the separation that currently surrounds us, and how to transmute it, see Charles Eisenstein’s latest article, “The Conspiracy Myth”.

I had lots of reading and listening suggestions for you this week! Maybe that is also because I am spending less time thinking of what to share on social media. The internet is a magical place when it comes to in-depth and inspiring content. I hope you enjoy them.

Would you like to discover how the flowers might help you on your own creative projects? Make a free appointment with me here to talk to you about it creative coaching with me and the flowers. I only have a few more weeks of an open calendar before I begin some temporary summer work, so book an appointment with me now. Here’s a testimonial from a satisfied writer I am coaching:

Imagine if you had your own personal guide to help nurture your creativity, build your resilience, pursue your passions, and address the challenges standing between you and your goals? As a creative coach, Amy is unlike anyone you've ever met. She combines ancient wisdom with cutting-edge practices. She distills her deep connection with nature into a tonic for the human soul. She has an extraordinary intuition for what we need to hear, how we should learn, who we can call on, and where we can go. 

Guided meditations with Amy have breathed new life into my creative process, and she has helped me to remove obstacles in my daily life that were impeding my progress. Her gentle suggestions, practical guidance, and astonishing insights have changed not just my creative output, but the way I approach my life. Amy's respect for her clients' dignity, privacy, and trust is a reflection of her grace, humility, and values. 

If you find yourself at a crossroads, at a stop sign, in a dark tunnel, or on a long and winding road, Amy will light your path -- and help you go farther than you could imagine going alone. 

- Amanda in Geneva, Switzerland

That’s all for now I think. I can’t wait to see what this cycle will bring for you and for me. With green love,

Amy

Daffodils in the Snow: Opening Eyes and Heart with the New Moon in Taurus

It snowed yesterday, and I plunged back into Winter, and into a dark moon internal landscape that was challenging. Snow on daffodils, clumped together, seeing in the dark. My eyes hurt. It was Earth Day. I felt darkness and instability. But today the sun is shining, it is above freezing, and the daffodils have regained their aplomb. I admire them for their resilience and tenacity. I’ll be like them, and bounce right back from a freeze. I’ll open my eyes to perceive a blue sky and the humming of life, if not yet of the honey bee. I’ll feel my bulb in the ground and feel the green stirring in my heart. This is where I am supposed to be.

Collective Grief

The New Moon in Taurus, almost conjunct Uranus and square Saturn, was last night at 10:30 EST. By that time, I had sufficiently attended to my own despondency to realize several things. One is that there is a lot of grief to feel, so I can chalk up my dark moon difficulties to the collective energies as well. A lot of souls are leaving us at this time. A lot of people are hurting more than usual. The Earth had her day, her 50th official Earth Day, and the forecast is grim. We have so far not responded adequately to an ecological crisis that we are witnessing and have been witnessing for as long as I have been alive, and even longer. I feel like a little girl who, born with a certain optimism about the world, does not understand the stupidity of her elders. The world is not as I want it to be and as I know it can be, personally, socially or societally. It’s not the choices I’ve made, it’s not personal despondency, it’s just a feeling we are not where we are supposed to be. Why have we not acted yet? What are we waiting for?

Another World is Possible

Well, apparently we were waiting for the corona virus which seems to be doing the job for us. The Earth is breathing a little easier. It’s still not the world I dream of though, the world of interconnection between all life, the world of listening and careful attention, with humanity safely back in its place in the larger scheme of things, but I’m starting to see my dream of another world reflected more widely around me. We are all slowing down. We are all taking the time to be a little more conscious now that we aren’t speeding around. This is encouraging to me.

The Work That Reconnects

But to get back to the New Moon and the grief I felt with it, there is a lot of grief to feel right now and we need to feel it to move forward. Joanna Macy, inventor of a method to reconnect us to the Earth and each other, The Way That Reconnects, speaks to this, and I know that in feeling some grief, in processing and letting go during the dark moon of just a little of the pain of the Earth and what we have done to her, even if I feel it in a personal way, even as it is pain that relates specifically to my story (especially as a woman), I am doing my part to heal her. I will keep healing her. Reconnecting means reconnecting to the pain that I have avoided, to the wounded parts of myself as well as to the pain reflected around me in the world, in others and in the plants and animals I see.

Uranian Energies for the New

Sparks are flying from all the healing we are doing, collectively and individually too. With the New Moon almost conjunct Uranus in Taurus, we can feel a special spark of desire for new beginnings of all kinds. Uranus has revolutionary tendencies, and we may set intentions at this time that are beyond our usual frame of reference. You may want to totally reinvent yourself. I know I do. And luckily, there is lots of energy there to help us do so. Can you imagine yourself shiny and new, emerging into the world to change it? This is what this New Moon asks of you. The square to Saturn reminds us that this will not be easy work. We need to strive and establish routines. We need diligence, not just passion.

Courting the Wild Twin

As I drove in my car through blushing pink yet still leafless Vermont mountains today, I listened to a beautiful new book by one of my favorite teachers, Martin Shaw. He talks about exactly this, the happy medium between the red and the white, the fire of passion and the goodness of routine. He writes of tempering, an old word that describes the appropriate mixing of the humors and I am reminded of medieval lessons on love. The heart needs to experience both the light and the dark in order to be forged into a diamond, to become the true lover. He tells two stories of the wild twin which tell the tale of this alchemical working, The Lindworm and Tatterhood. I realized that they are the perfect narratives to help me along on the shadow work journey I’ve been on for a while, a journey which asks me to embrace all the remnants of the neglected and exiled parts of myself, the bits of passions denied because they didn’t fit in or were too dark, and I’m starting to get the hang of it. My large and scary serpent, a gift of my rising sign in Scorpio, is no longer as threatening. When I’ve worked with Martin Shaw in person, he always ask us to consider where we are in a given story, as this can open up perspectives on our own lives. In the Lindworm, I’m the naked white worm getting scrubbed before becoming beautiful and whole. In Tatterhood, I am not sure, but I think my head is no longer hanging on a rusty nail in the witches’ long house. It’s a process in any case, and I am glad to have the company of these tales. I made myself a beautiful personal flower essence blend too, and the flowers help me tell my story in a new way, kissing old wounds away. Click here to find your way to your own soothing flower friend or make an appointment with me here to talk and listen in for a special blend for you.

Expansion and Abundance

The two words I got last night during a group ritual for the New Moon with another one of my teachers, Aeolian Heart, were expansion and abundance. The New Moon is traditionally a time of expansion, for the planting of seeds and the growing of dreams. Taurus reminds me of abundance and the earthy pleasures of this sign, which even if they are tinged with revolutionary fervor by Uranus, remain tried and true and stable. How am I taking care of myself at this time? How can I continue to do so? I pulled the Four of Coins tarot card for this week so I am asking myself what I am holding on to. This card is earthy too, and not always in a positive way, but this week I see it as a reminder to not give too much of myself away. To stabilize my own abundance before offering myself and my energies to others. This seems like a potent lesson at this time when we are being asked to look inwards and tend to our inner fires, however small or neglected they are. May yours move into blooming this Taurus season, and as the moon waxes, may you find ways to celebrate your own expansion into new aspects of you.

The Warmth Will Come

Shadow work expands your heart too. Maybe that is what the daffodils do all winter in the dark; they focus on their hearts, so that in the spring they can burst out into seeing the world with love, however cold it might be at first. The warmth will come, the warmth will come.

Blessings of reinvention and Spring abundance to you!

P.S. Make a free appointment with me here if you would like some guidance with your creative journey. Integrating our shadows unleashes enormous amounts of creative energy and I’d be happy to talk about this process with you.

Zero Gravity: Lessons for the New Moon and Mercury Retrograde in Pisces

A New Moon in Pisces with Mercury retrograde in that sign, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so slowed down. I’m swimming in the unconscious and sleeping a lot, embracing my darkness, taking a trip on the self-love underground. I’m listening to the water drip and the clocks tick. Something is coming but it is still incubating. I’m watching for its slow emergence.

I’m taking care of four cats and a dog, noticing how animals are naturally slow. Cats sit and stare, becoming agitated when they think a meal is coming. The dog rests until it is time to come rouse me and go for a walk. I like letting their rhythms rule mine for the weekend. I’ve put my agenda on hold.

In the house I’m taking care of, there is a zero gravity setting on the bed I am sleeping in. I’ve been putting myself there to write down dreams, to rest. It feels so relaxing, and very Piscean!

A new moon is a new beginning. I’m planting the seed of myself, deep down under the Earth. My sun is in Pisces, so I’m already naturally in these slow, deep waters, but this moon feels epically so. I’m tracking my dreams, both those that come when I’m sleeping and those I make with my eyes open. I practice, like the cats, keeping my eyes half closed, to see the space in between the sleeping and the waking, the way reality comes together like two eye-lids, half closed.

Animal Emotions

Animals are naturally emotive in an uncomplicated way so spending time with them can help us be too. One cat likes to sit on my gloves on the table. Another sits on my chest while I knit. Another curls up in a box to hide while another one wants to play. All of them are in and out of emotional states rapidly and gracefully. They hiss, then cuddle. I blink my eyes at them.

Emotional Awareness

This season is asking us to become more aware of our emotions, and more patient with them as well. Mercury retrograde can make us feel stuck with them, but I’ve noticed that as I breath, listen to music, talk a walk, they flow. Maybe the flow is a bit slow, it’s still icy out there, but they do flow. Like icicles gathering then disappearing. Sometimes they are like reverse icicles growing up from the ground, coming from some deep space I don’t even know, reaching for the light, bringing me back to situations I thought I’d already said goodbye to, but in the dark they appear again so that I can let them go.

Dream Work

Neptune is also in Pisces, so I’d like to take a moment to talk about dream work. I’ve learned so much by simply writing down my dreams every morning. If I don’t remember them, I write down that I don’t remember them. The dreams get clearer with this practice, though there are still times when they are cloudy. When I write them down and talk about them with friends, I can get perspective on my life. I can take symbolic action on them. This is a way of showing myself that I am listening to myself. Synchronicities start to arise. I know which paths to follow, instinctively. My intuition gets stronger. Tracking dreams is a way to commit to a fruitful dialogue with yourself. It doesn’t always have to be profound. Taking action on a dream can be calling up a friend, buying a book, eating a certain meal.

As a Pisces, sometimes my dreams seem more real than reality, so I can go deep with them. I can dream in a dream. I can dream in a dream when I’m awake too. Right now the Piscean waters are so deep that I can get perspective. I can be miles below myself or miles above. I like playing with these distances. They are not getting me anywhere, but I know that such explorations will help me feel more here, in the moment, in my dream time actuality. Zero gravity.

Zero Gravity

What are the ways we can be zero gravity with ourselves? We can go there with our bodies by feeling how supported we are in our environment, even if we don’t have a zero gravity bed. Any moment has zero gravity potential. I’m resting into the way things are. I feel safe and held.

Datura

I did a flower essence attunement today, with an essence I made in the Fall, a beautiful, dark and strong flower spirit, Datura. When I made her she communicated with me her rage at not being seen. I felt immediate recognition of this feeling in myself. What are the parts of yourself that feel this rage at not being recognized or acknowledged?

Today her message was more gentle, but still had to do with finding constructive expression for this rage. I remembered all the ways my purest essence was silenced as a child, and all the ways I silenced myself.

A white trumpet at the top of my spine
a back bend in time
reaching back to meet myself
I am whole unto myself
a circle in time
I have clarity in all situations
clarity of vision
I see myself as I truly am
unabashed, unashamed
I own my experiences
I come back to myself,
again, again, again.

What a beautiful message to be gifted on this New Moon.

Let me know if you would like this essence, part of a line of shadow work essences I am developing. They aren’t up in my shop yet, so just drop me a line.

If you would like to explore working with me to learn how to connect to plants, get your own messages from the flowers and improve your relationship with your truest self, make a free appointment with me here.

Love and blessings unfolding in deep waters,

Amy

Goats in the Tree: Slowing to Eclipse and Surrendering to Capricorn in 2020

The Tree Climbing Goats of Morocco

Since the Winter Solstice, I’ve been going slower and slower, surrendering to this time of the year and to the demands of my body. On one side of the December 25th New Moon and Solar Eclipse, I fell on the ice and sprained my wrist. On the other, I got a cold, caught from my wonderful, visiting nieces and nephews. I felt depleted, underground, depressed. I lost sight of my purpose and felt pain. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do much of anything. I had to surrender. What did I surrender to?

First I surrendered to the New Moon in Capricorn. Capricorn energy is a goat scampering up a huge mountain, from the depths to the heights he strives, but the going is tough and he doesn’t have much room on the ledges he chooses to pause on. During a climb, there is always that part of it where you have to surrender to the fact that you are climbing. I read that it wasn’t a good New Moon for making intentions and for manifestation and I felt this too; it was better to observe. So that is what I did.

Uphill, downhill. I trudged and drove up and down, back and forth between my house and the house where my family was gathered. As happens when family is about, I had to see and surrender to the things in my life that I don’t like. If I am a goat, it means I don’t mind going where it is hard for others to go. I’m climbing towards the sun even when it is dark. I’m climbing out of the cave, off of the page. Restrictions. I think this was all good practice for the year to come. It will be a year filled with this Capricorn energy. We’ll have to adapt as best we can as Saturn conjuncts Pluto in Capricorn. Right now, as I write, Jupiter is there conjunct Mercury. The Sun is moving through it towards Saturn and Pluto which are almost conjunct. I don’t know how anyone can imagine moving quickly. I can barely move at all, what with all these goats trying to climb and so little room. I’m left laughing though, with that image in my mind of the goats that climb the tree. Maybe that is a better image of the year for me. The tree the goats like to climb is an Argan tree, which grows in Morocco and produces one of my favorite oils. It whispers to me of abundance in aridity and longevity; it’s known for keeping the skin youthful. I’ll keep that message with me.

I’ve been thinking about what an eclipse is. In expressions, to eclipse something means to leave it behind, in the dust, to make it disappear. Literally an eclipse means that darkness, the moon, covers the light, the sun, leaving a halo before moving on and revealing the light to us again. This ring of fire exists because of the darkness, reminding us of the sun and how it will come again. On this side of the Solstice, though we are still deep in Winter, I know that the buds on the empty trees are already getting ready, beginning to swell, light yellow on the horizon amidst the grey. But first there is more to let go of, and often an eclipse will help release things we have been unwilling to release.

With letting go we find restrictions too. Sometimes I feel bound by the things I want to keep. Yet what is hardest to let go of? I realized this season that, ironically, what is hardest to let go of is what I don’t like about myself. These parts are hardest to let go of because I haven’t owned them yet, I don’t even want to see them. How can I accept these parts of the real me that I don’t like? I found that just being with them, instead of fighting with myself about them, or thinking about how I could change them, made them fit to my skin, and though itchy at first like a wool suit, I found I could adjust to them and then slough them off, letting them drop in the fire, like the thoughts that come unbidden in the morning, reminding me of my failures or shortcomings. I could befriend them. I could even feel happy and content with them. I could enjoy my family gatherings with a cold. I could be with people and not have to do anything. My hurt wrist prevented me from overdoing, trying to please, or even doing the minimum to help. I had to sit back and surrender to the restrictions of my injury. It wasn’t so bad actually. Everyone helped me and no one complained. I even got to be a little bit princess-y. So though I felt down, I also felt held in the dark, thankful for sleep and rest. These days I wake up in the mornings thrilled to be in my warm bed, with no thoughts at all in my head. I’ve taken the time to do nothing.

So as we move into 2020, it’s heavy there on the South Node, with all those goats in the tree. Maybe that’s you and me. Maybe the smartest thing to do is not to move at all, for we might fall and I don’t think I can catch you. But if we balance, if we let things be, we might get through, and hear the wind in the trees, and what the essence of the tree is telling us to do. I’m starting to get an idea. Are you?

If you want to talk about the cosmic energies, and the ones the plants might be whispering about to you, make an appointment with me here. I’m currently accepting new creatives who would like to deepen their creative practice by honing their Earth connection with the plants for three or six month online, one-on-one programs. What would it be like to work with me? Make an appointment for a free consultation to find out!

Stars Are Arrows that Arrive: Taking Action With the New Moon in Sagittarius

Mugwort in the frost…

It is the first day of December. Last night, in the waxing moonlight, the stars were a reflection of the snow-sparkle on the ground, and I was held between in the clear and silent cold as I walked up the hill to my home. I didn’t want to be anywhere else, just there, breathing in the cold air and hearing only the crunch of my steps, dizzy from tipping my head back to feel the sky. I’m slightly off my moon cycle blog writing schedule, but today feels like a good day to give you the download from last Tuesday’s New Moon in Sagittarius.

Sagittarius is a fiery sign, the image of a centaur letting an arrow fly, Chiron, or the son of Pan, Crotus, who invented archery. Both of these images represent someone taking action, and this is what my download was about. I saw myself taking action on my desires, and thinking about how to become more skilled at doing this.

Taking action has never really been my strong point. I sat on my dissertation for a long time. I enjoy the feeling of having lots of time and not having to take action. I like putting things off to the point that I have sometimes missed opportunities. I can over identify with the feminine energies of allowing, of being passive and responsive instead of assertive, so I know I need to bring some balance to this aspect of myself. Maybe it is also how I define myself that keeps me from being active. I was programmed to see myself as a woman, learned early on how to identify as a victim, and spent much of my early adult life putting myself in dangerous situations which allowed me to learn that I needed to protect myself. On my bulletin board there is a card I have travelled with for a while, the image of a princess waiting, fragile and sore. The romantic ideal relies on this idea of a passive female figure. To my credit, as much as I have identified with this version of the feminine, I have also always loved mythological female figures that are active, daring and dynamic. Diana hunts, Athena wages war and commands the intellect, Medusa turns you into stone with her eyes. Yet it is hard sometimes to forget the negative perception of active female energy, best summarized in our western ideology by the story of Eve and the apple. My experience has taught me as much. How many times have my actions resulted in rejection, in coming across as too much, in being misunderstood? And though I love envisioning female desire as active, it is often easier to sit back and not take action. I feel safer that way, and when I want to take action, a lot of fear comes up. So I’ve often gone back and forth between these two extremes, conscious of when I accepted being passive, then revolting against it. A lot of my intellectual work as revolved around thinking about love and working out how to imagine both sides of the love equation as active. Maybe part of the problem is the polarity of this thinking: I’m either doing or not doing. Maybe there is a middle ground, and if there is one, I think it is located in the seed of my desires.

My desires, especially my deepest ones, do not want to be given short shrift or left in the closet of my consciousness. Lately I have been paying attention to them, unearthing them and accepting them. My desires are powerful, they are keys to creation, and if I want to improve the world, I need my will, however refused or demeaned it has been. I think it is important though to be able to define true desires versus false or imposed desires. My material needs are met, so I need to be wary of wanting more, in a superficial way. And it is important to know why we have certain desires. Are they coming from the right place? Do I want something or someone because I need reassurance or attention, or is my desire the reflection of a deeper need, a universal imperative for the good of all? Lately I seek to identify which of my desires deserve to be held up to the light of manifestation. Which ones are false projections and which ones are true?  

Which leads me to action. Which desires do I want to take action on? Will my actions harm anyone or anything around me? It seems to me that the desires that come from a true place within me are easy to take action on, whereas those that are superficial feel harder to act on, sometimes come from a place of fear, and have the potential for negative fallout. But if I can first identify my true desire, I can then work on right action. This all feels very hypothetical to me at the moment. Let me see if I can give you an example, related to my work with the plant world:

When I started my business, it came from a place of wanting to share my gifts with the world in a way that would improve the situation of the Earth and her inhabitants. Taking action at first came easily, and still does, when I listen to the plants. They remind me of our interconnection, and point me in the right direction. They help me see my true desires. Mugwort reminds me I want to see clearly through my dreams, so I need to write them down in the morning. White Pine has lately been reminding me I want to stay healthy through the winter, I want to feel grounded and safe, and if I tune into these desires, I know which actions to take on a day to day basis: drink lots of water, spend time outdoors. Lemon Verbena reminds me to relax, and leads me to using her salve in certain ways. Somehow, listening to the plants helps me identify my true desires and be able to activate my will in a way that will not harm and will help myself and others. Sometimes it is hard to listen to this outer voice of my desire, but I find that if I listen from a place of connection, I can stay in the flow of my action and I will not cause harm . This leaves me in a place of gratefulness and right relationship. Listening to the plants brings me home.

This reminds me of an Aleutian story I learned this summer, Fox Woman, and how, after many trials, her running steps planted stars. I wonder how you integrate and contemplate your desires, and how they lead to your actions. If you would like to talk to me about how to feel more interconnected and how to take action based on this feeling, make an appointment with me here! I would love to talk to you about how to activate more heart-centered actions, and this dark time is a good time to unearth some forgotten desires. I’d love to hear what the plants have to say about yours, and help you listen in yourself.

Here is to all your pointed arrows that reach their destinations and arrive, shining brightly and leading you home.

Lots of still and frosty love,

Amy

A New Moon in Libra: How I Broke Up with My Phone and Learned to Relate to Myself

Holding Calendula instead of my phone. She’s much sweeter!

Lately I feel so strange to myself. My phone broke. I think it was because of a flower. The last picture I took was of a Datura I was communing with in a friend’s garden. And then an update wouldn’t take, and wouldn’t take and wouldn’t take until it wouldn’t turn on at all. So I’ve left it on a chair. I broke up with my phone.

My life without a phone: I miss my astrology application that tells me about the times and placements of alignments and risings and settings of planets and sun. I miss my menstrual cycle tracker. I think that’s about it. What I don’t miss are the hours I wasted staring into a device that doesn’t reflect the world around me or allow me to engage with it. It’s scary to think we are all so used to doing this, to perceiving the world more and more through this interface.

My first smart phone was given to me by a boyfriend in 2012. I felt some resistance, but agreed to engage for a little while. Unfortunately I did not give up the phone at the end of the six month relationship and it has been with me ever since. But I don’t think my phone is compatible with plant communication somehow, so it’s interesting that it has given up the ghost now. What I notice since living without it: My sleep is different, longer or shorter, and more intense. My days are longer and I do more. There are more hours. I engage more with my surroundings. I see more beauty. I talk to more flowers. As I go phoneless, I receive more messages from the universe. It’s that simple. And what do we receive from the Universe? The love that starts us and keeps us going. I never received that from my phone.

This new moon is about receiving love. Venus will soon rise as the evening star and beam down on me. Am I ready to take it all in? I think my phone was getting in the way. My other blocks to receiving love are still there of course but it’s as if I can see them more clearly. Maybe it’s because I’m not staring into a screen to avoid them. I’ve lost my main means of distraction from myself. I wonder at this object, small and shiny, produced as a product to make me into one (conversations at the farm have been about commodification of the self) and as I take a step back from it, I become more myself. The world spins. I make decisions. I may take fewer pictures, but I see more. I don’t have anything to show for myself, but I am more myself without this constant thing to check. It does make it a bit strange to be in the present world, but I suppose no stranger than it is for a flower to be today, or a butterfly. I want to be whole and rooted. I am seeding thankfulness and gratefulness, sun-ward, like them.

I also wanted to write about wholeness – another moon whisper. The cosmic energies are not particularly harmonious at the moment: Venus is square the Moon’s nodes and Saturn who sits on the south one, so there is a karmic tension about endings. Fall has come and we are descending into darkness, moving away from our mothering aspects of self. Perhaps we are being too harsh on ourselves. I’m thinking about relationship and those that brought me into darkness and those that brought me out. I’ve often felt, and been told, that I give too much, but I see now that my giving was seeking to fill a void I sensed, to bring balance, to fill in what was missing there: a too cold heart, an unfeeling mind. My balancing act with others was a beautiful, if sometimes painful, art. I’ve since learned that the only void I can really fill is the one inside myself and that people should do their own void filling for themselves, so I don’t try so hard now. I’m finding my own divinity and learning from this divine within myself. The planets of my birth chart as they move through the sky remind me of the universe moving within myself, all these complex aspects, singing together. Outside as inside, that old saying, the moon reminds us too, balancing the dark and the light.

 What are your new moon intentions? Now is the time to send out what you would like to bring in. The new moon is dark longing, followed by, when she meets the sun, receptivity and becoming, openness to change. I feel the moon slipping down to the void of herself, the void of me. I’m a thin sliver now, dreaming of the dark, not yet anticipating Spring, but reveling in what the roots speak to me. This morning I made an altar and petitioned the planets for a little while. I’d love to help you start a moon centered ritual cycle. Let me know if you think creative coaching with me might help you connect to the universe and write, paint, sing, draw or work on your pet project with the help of the plants! May you listen deeply!

A New Moon Wind: Virgo vs. Pisces or How to Love Your Non-Duality

The divided world… Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, 11th Century

I woke up last Friday to the sound of the wind, blowing from the South, and I thought of the forest fires in the Amazon and the hurricane preparing over the southern oceans. Where was I feeling this storm, this burning? A few weeks ago I had the shingles and felt that they were the reflection on my skin of the forests in Siberia burning. The Amazon, I think, I’m feeling as a burning from within. There is a rage at how things ARE. I observe this destructive time and the small or big ways I see it all around me. Then there are the ways this destructive time is within me, and I am a part of it.

I recently I bought a car. This is something I thought I would never do, since I saw the car as the epitome of all I dislike about our current system: speed, waste, environmental destruction, blind humanity racing towards its own demise. But the reality of living in rural Vermont has dawned on me and to my surprise, now that I have bought one - with all the harrowing emotions of the first time! - having a car is one of the most freeing things I have ever done. So I’ve had to hold these two parts of myself as one: the me that hates using fossil fuels and the me that loves to be independently mobile and who is a very part of the destructive world I can observe as if I were separate.

This realization was humbling. Seeing the world as separate from ourselves equals holding ourselves above it, and I think so many of our problems come from this perceived division between ourselves and the world around us. I put a barrier between myself and others, between me and the Earth and Sky, because I fear that I can’t integrate my own complexity. But my recent illness taught me once again that we are one: my body is your body is the Earth’s body.  

When I sat down to listen to the wind, the New Moon in Virgo spoke to me of duality. Virgo wants to do everything right (one of the first things I saw when I woke up was the image on the right, the cover of a magazine on the kitchen counter!) and on Friday the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars and Mercury were all there, in Virgo. That’s called a stellium in astrology speak, and that’s a lot of energy focused on everyone wanting to do everything right. My Sun is in Pisces who sits opposite Virgo in the sky, which means that all of these planets were hanging out reflecting the light of my natal Sun, my shining Self (some call it the ego). Pisces, in some ways, represents the opposite of wanting to do things right. Sometimes Pisces is the opposite of doing anything at all. Virgo is about distinction, contrast and duality, while Pisces is about merging, nuance and ambiguity. Virgo doesn’t want to go with the flow. Pisces is content to sit in the water and float. Sometimes she doesn’t even care if she is going anywhere. So I know this duality. And we all have it, just as we all have all the other contrasts that the sky represents for us: the outgoing and the shy, the confident and the embarrassed, the joyful and the depressed. These all make up a part of the little fractal beings that we are and each one of these parts is illuminated differently by the stars at different times. It can be a lot to get used to. Especially with all the planets staring at you.

So just as the darker parts of ourselves can seem overwhelming at times, sometimes the devastation we see on the outside, especially if we focus on it exclusively, can seem like a lot. People are more or less touched by it and we all have different strategies for dealing with it at our disposal. I think it is good to remember this too, that we are all touched differently by the outside world, with more or less privilege and protection, and this realization can also bring its own breath of welcome humility. As for my strategies, I tend to search for historical explanations and create through it, that is I use the catastrophe to motivate me towards some form of artistic expression, or the destruction becomes the matter for creation. I like seeing the big picture too, and if this doesn’t work, I notice my divisive thoughts and choose not act on them. I may choose to open them up for discussion with a trusted friend or two. This often reveals my contradictions for what they are and helps me step back into a more holistic view. The plants also help me do this. They are constantly reminding of the blessings in perceived difficulty or darkness. I realized my illness – the shingles! – as uncomfortable as it was, was also an introduction to the healing powers of Saint John’s Wort, who is now forever in my heart, in my apothecary and within my body of skills as a healer to offer when someone else might have need for it.

It’s also good to see our one-sided vision for what it is: a kind of blindness. Not that we should ignore the calls for change, the new wind that is blowing, which are becoming louder and more demanding by the day, but just that we should insist on seeing the whole picture, for ourselves and the people around us. My whole picture includes driving a car but also doing a lot of work on the land and in my community in order to embody the change I want to see. It’s not going to be perfect, I’m not going to do everything right, but I am going to live in my corner of the world and shed light and peace around me, as much as I can. You are probably doing this too.

The fires are burning and the animals are dying, but more and more people are waking up. It’s as if the fires are lighting up collective consciousness, showing us the way. And in the burning, there subsists a little green. I talked to a fisherman the other night and he said there were no fish in the streams, but I took a walk through the woods to a pond and saw them, small, swimming upstream. I don’t know where the world is going, but I know it’s going to be okay. I’m becoming more and more friends with myself every single day.

A friend sent me bits of this poem by Mary Oliver the other day. Here is the whole thing, for her, and for you. It captures something.

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

                                             1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

                                             2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.

                                             3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
   still another.

                                             4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.

And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

                                             5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
   change.
Congratulations, if
   you have changed.

                                             6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
   fabulous reason?

And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
   your life—
what would do for you?

                                             7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

***

The poet is clear here, so I don’t need to say anymore.

Love and later summer gleaming,

Amy

P.S. Let me know how this new moon felt to you by getting in touch (amy@enosburghessences.com) or setting up an appointment to talk!

Tending the Fire Inside: Shingles, Lughnasadh and the New Moon in Leo

The last month has been a deep delving into old-new territory. Things feel familiar and strange at the same time. There was some travel. I flew to England. I spent a few days in story with wonderful teacher and story master Martin Shaw and new friends on the same path of searching within myth time for meaning. I watched the partial full moon eclipse with them by a fire and didn’t write an update here, too much in the shadows to share. I wandered for a day on the moor in Devon and had what I think was an initiation with Hawthorn that I’m still digesting and wondering how to share. I went to an academic conference and shared research I did a few years ago on Wilton Abbey and the women that read there in the 13th century. I recently had an important realization about the relevance of this side of my work. A discussion in July with an evolutionary astrologer Sabrina Monarch which led to a discovery about my life mission: not speaking for the flowers but bringing the past to the present. Maybe speaking for the flowers also brings the past to the present in a way. I’m nurturing forgotten connections, often feeling I’m in direct contact with plant ancestors when doing so, and this, like academic research, takes some time and processing. Then I went to Montreal for a few days (the city! the botanic garden! the market! the heat! the poutine! the nine breathing bodies in the hostel room!) and got the shingles.

So now I’m home in Vermont with the shingles, feeling the burning under my skin, deep in the nerve system, and how it reflects the ripening time out there: this fire inside of reds and yellows and oranges that has come to the surface. I feel like my illness is also the culmination of the eclipse time when I was working with my shadows and focusing on what I wanted to release: here is the proof on my skin, blisters of what I want to be free of, my own dis-ease in the world. There is anger there, diffuse, at the way the world turns, at the men in charge, at the way I am seen, at the damage done. A first harvest of this, erupting. I like working with illness this way. How do my symptoms reflect what I am feeling? How do they reflect what is happening in the world? It helps to bear the illness not to take the symptoms too personally, and to understand how our understanding of the symptoms is a part of the healing. I’m taking Saint John’s wort tincture made by a neighbor, a mushroom tincture made by a local herbalist, Swiss Echinacea tincture, and an antiviral while slathering my sores in Saint John’s wort oil (made before I left and left outside while I traveled) and calamine lotion. Let me know if you want to know more about my protocol that seems to be doing me well! A good mix of allopathic and herba medecine, after an urgent visit to the doctor, though I do not wish this tingling painful curse of secret stocked virus on you.

Lughnasadh is the Celtic festival of the ripening time, when everything is at its most green. It celebrates the god Lugh, of the Long Arm, the Shining One, god of the spear and the sun. The Romans associated him with Mercury, who appropriately went direct this week. We are now called to move forward boldly with our skills. I had a fire last night to outwardly burn what needed to go, old remnants of words written long ago and some herbs saved through the seasons to give to the fire and purify our purging. Life is quick and flowing now. The monarchs are out and they never rest. The robins have placed three more pale blue eggs in their nests, and the bird song is crystalline in the forest. I saw a doe with two fawns across the pond, flicking flies away with the whites of their tails. Life runs quickly now, and I’m in it and I don’t know how to catch it. I don’t try. It’s warm and fast and busy and buzzing. I feel in this sanctuary here, where you can still hear the world the way it wants to be heard, where the silence isn’t silence and the stars still sing as they are born. And I’ve been drinking the richest raw milk and fermented things and sleeping, and dreaming of the gifts I want to offer the world. 

And yet death is also here, perhaps never so present as during the peak of the harvest. Lugh’s grandfather was Balor who lived in the underworld. While I was away my old rabbit died, after fourteen years of companionship, and it’s hard to be without him now, my old friend who was so true. The eclipse time is one of leaving. In the forest I found Ghost Pipe clusters and a deer skull with some teeth still in place. I could wriggle them but not get one to come out. I don’t know how to read the signs of this death. I can only stare. And the shingles burning makes me think of my own certain demise, our brightness that will one day burst into darkness and go back to the earth, or maybe the stars. So the wheel comes around again, and we know that we are living bright and special days of leaves and flowers and sounds. And I am grateful and tend to the fire inside. The new moon is a special time for this tending, after the dark moon and the dying. I made a wish on Jupiter who came out first and bright last night, and saw a long-armed shooting star who took my wish on. I like thinking of Lugh and the Lion as bright bearers of this month’s intentions.

Blessings to your fires of summer! Please get in touch if you are interested in following the cycles of the year with me. New offers are a two-hour class on plant communication and flower essence making and individual creative coaching with the plants. I’d love to talk to you about them and you can make an appointment here. You can also support me on Patreon where I offer plant inspired poetry and flower wisdom. I’d love to roll into autumn with you, with whatever you are releasing or calling in.

May your wheels keep smoothly turning and your harvests be fruitful!

Eclipse Season Drama: The Ending of the World and a Prayer for Summer

I’ve been waiting to post since the New Moon because of the eclipses. What do they want me to say? It has been a rich few weeks and I haven’t wanted to say much. I had a very deep essence making experience with Cramp Bark the weekend of the Solstice at a Flower Essence training and since then I have maintained a feeling of permanent connection to the green realm. As a result, I’ve felt disconnected from this one. Making the magic with plant connection lifts me up and sets me down differently. Cramp Bark essence will be part of a line of essences meant to aid shadow work. It isn’t up in my shop yet, but its message is about helping us embrace our whole selves, dark and light. Let me know if you want some. I call it Erasure of Duality. It helps us own the darkest side of ourselves, integrate our most difficult experiences and calm our harshest judgments which depend on our belief in polarity. I shared the poem she offered me with the second tier and up of my Patreon supporters. You can get the full download here. I’d love it if you wanted to join me there!

So I’ve met myself whole, with the help of the plant realm, and I’m looking for words to describe what that feels like.

But this New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer has me also searching to answer other questions. Within this unity, who am I? Who am I without my stories and my past? Cancer is about home and mothering and I am home with my mother, watching how she mother’s herself, how I mother myself, and the connections between the two, seeing the old patterns of feeling and relating with my father. Who am I without the stories of my parents? I learned that until we are three, we share our energy centers with them, so any insecurities or lack of self-love of theirs become ours. Ancestors pass things on to us too, down the gene lines, the DNA chain. Who am I without the steps of my ancestors? Depending on how far back you go, we also share our DNA with the trees. My wholeness resides there I think, back in the time of slow plant evolution, back to soil and bark and loam.

A total solar eclipse feels like the end of the world in some ways. Slowly the sun goes dark. I remember a children’s book I had when I was small about some farm animals who become increasingly panicked at the growing dark. They gather together and tremble. And eclipse season is a time of deaths, people go, we let go. I’ve been spending a lot of time with my very elderly rabbit, and Cramp Bark showed me how death is inside all life. I am constantly dying to outdated versions of myself. It feels good to let these selves go, but then arises the fear of the unknown. What if the Sun doesn’t come back? In Cancer we can feel like children in need of safety and reassurance. Especially today. If I watch the news, it feels like we are only minutes away from certain and complete disaster. Yet I wake and the birds are singing. I feed them and I eat and sleep and dream. I meditate and write.

With these thoughts in mind I wrote a prayer for summer. Feel free to recite it daily to your garden, and to add your own stanzas.

An Edward Burne-Jones Tapestry

A Prayer for Summer

May there always be
an abundance of birds
and the small insects
and larvae and caterpillars
they eat. May they always
mate and mate again,
nest and wait and feed
and nourish their young.

May there always be
moths beating their wings
at my window and
fireflies winking me to sleep.

May it always be hot
in the sun and then cool
in the shade or the lake
or river or pond or pool
before bed at twilight.

In the morning,
may the dew always come
to water the petals of my dreams.

May all things be allowed
to ripen and flourish and live.

May the peonies and the
lupines and the mallow
and the roses always say
there is more to come
more to come
more to come.

Cancer season also has me remembering and reading of how, as children, the gateways of our perception are open, and as we choose to open them again today, as if for the first time, there is the same awe and joy at what we find and see. This feeling comes first. I hope it still comes first for you, these ripening days.

Much love,

Amy

Flowers Are How a Plant Sees: A New Moon in Gemini and a Guided Meditation for the Seeds of Your Intentions

We have two eyes in our heads, twins on our faces.

Creeping Charlie: Glechoma

To step outside in a world full of blossom
flowers are how a plant sees
to step inside and under the trees
in the buzz that is bees
the breeze is large and forgiving
a gentle landing a posing down
flowers are how a plant sees

I welcomed a new moon this morning, took a walk in the sun along the river here and I’m now sitting by the fire as it has turned cold and wet, in typical Vermont fashion. I don’t mind. I don’t worry about the strangeness of the weather here. I feel safe and protected amidst the green. I don’t think I’m ignoring the problems, just coming back to center, and being as I need to be, growing connections that are meaningful to me, and embodying the change I want to see.

I didn’t write a post for the Full Moon in Scorpio two weeks ago, but I feel like I did a good job releasing all that it wanted me to release: I moved, cleaned out the contact list on my phone, and did everything in between, along with a lot of crying. Here I am now feeling taller and stronger and where I am supposed to be. I’m ending stories I’ve dreamed about ending. I’m making room for the new, and my dreams have been clearing me out too: they have been crowded with lots of stuff to sort and lose and let go of.

The theme for the last month has been clarity, and it rounded off nicely with a week of drinking Ground Ivy, Creeping Charlie, the Glechoma pictured about, a small plant that caught my eye in my parents’ yard, and realizing that flowers are how a plant sees. I suddenly realized how watched we are by them. I came back to Vermont to a sea of Dandelions that I harvested, ate, drank and tinctured. I’m taking Dandelion tincture for support and feeling very supported. I don’t think I would have been able to do all this letting go if I weren’t. I’m feeling very shiny and new, maybe thanks to ingesting the plants, and maybe because with all these new eyes seeing me, I can see clearer too. My plant diet with Chamomile started my journey, a golden road to a new kind of perception, where I know how I am seeing things and I can choose what I see. Then Ground Ivy took my hand and accompanied me, to tell me we have eyes all over our bodies to see things as they really are, unclouded by a false perception, where I am not loved, where I am not love. “We crawl everywhere to see and to show you how your very bones are loved, every ounce of you”. The Dandelion root in my coffee concurred. “You’ll become powder one day too, but we will still love you”. Roots have eyes too.

Eyes to see
all of me
down in the deep
container of soul
I hold elements
encased in darkness,
gold, uniting for change
seeing the truth
embracing the dark
shadow to light
holding both at once
in my sight

I have planted a lot with this new moon, and as I did, a meditation came to me.

I offer it to you:

Ground into the Earth and connect to the sky.
Feel held in their love and give them yours.
Imagine yourself as the new moon, dark and receptive.
Next become a field.
Open to receive seeds: these might be planted by hand (what do you want to grow?) or dropped by a bird or blown on a breeze.
See the seeds of your intentions being sown into you.
Allow them to settle.
Know that you don’t have to make them grow but only need to nurture them with the right amount of sun and rain and soil.
Know that every thought that comes to distract you from your desired outcome, the memory of past difficulty or pain or doubt, becomes excellent compost to feed the soil of your dreams.
See these thoughts becoming leaves that feed the soil.
Come back into your body and thank the moon for helping you grow.

If you are interested in reading more of my Earth channeled writing, I’d love it if you chose to support me on Patreon! By signing up for my email list on my homepage, you’ll know when I post on here and you’ll be kept abreast of my offerings (to be developed and continued soon…) and if you’d like to develop and strengthen your own Earth channel for creative inspiration, I’d love to help the plants help you! You can schedule an exploratory call here.

I wish you a wonderful growing season, powerful clearsightedness and lots of quiet time in natural places.

Sensuality, Clarity and Transformation: Drinking Chamomile Tea with Pluto and Saturn on the New Moon in Taurus

Last night I dreamt of bulls, red bulls, pulling me into my sensuality, grounding me.

Last night I dreamt I had a hat that I received in the form of a crown; it came floating down to me out of the sky. When I put it on, it magically changed shape, becoming a red felt cloche, a flowered knit beanie, in accordance with how I was feeling. I felt it adapt and shift to the contours of my head. This hat was a marvel; I was a little girl living in a dystopic future, in a house patrolled from within by a security guard with dogs.

Awake to my own desires this Taurus season, the New Moon feels like a reminder to express myself, to put on my best hat, and to let this hat be what it wants to be, without censoring myself, as visible as a red bull in the world. With Pluto and Saturn on the South Node of the Moon (not an object in the sky but an astrological point, this one related to our pasts), both squaring the New Moon, it feels like Saturn is the guard, patrolling my insides, making sure I do what I need to do in order to grow up, while Pluto is the dog, looking for all the forgotten bits of soul I’ve left behind, sniffing them out and calling them home. He bundles them up, makes something beautiful and throws them away. I love it when the planets show up in my dreams. What’s outside is inside. I know I am okay. The past is cleared away. I feel like a new lover to myself.

I have been drinking chamomile tea everyday for two weeks, a plant diet, going deep into what her lesson is for me. What I keep coming back to is clarity: the clarity of her colour which is also the colour of my hair - the clarity of how she allows me to see - the improved clarity of my perception. I realize how clear and bright everyone’s eyes can be, the dream shining back to me my own light, which is everyone’s light, a feeling of wholeness and unity as her golden essence flows through my veins, cleaning my blood. I feel enveloped in a new way of perceiving that is free of judgments, free of my own thinking, in some sense free of me, full of golden tea. She shows me (and I already knew it but we need to be reminded of it) that I am 100% responsible for how I choose to see the world and what I choose to do in it.

I put on my best hat for the day and go out to meet the forces that play with me. They are inconstant, a running stream beneath me. I am not afraid to wade in. I go out with words. I leave a trace, a filament across the sky, my feet on the ground, in the water, my head in the stars. It feels good to be alive.

I’m encouraged by all the positive change I’m seeing in the world. More and more people are connecting to the Earth as a living organism, more and more conversations about plant communication (I’m dreaming of teaching an online course on that!), more and more stores without plastic, more and more countries banning it, more and more - like the inverse of progress - going back to a reciprocal idea of sustainable nourishment and love, and it all starts with ourselves. Pluto is also linked to love and death, two of the greatest forces of transformation. I’ve always been more interested in that for myself than in security or stability, and this explains many of my (sometimes unfortunate) decisions. This interest in transformation can be challenging for human relationship, but it poses no problem with the plants. Maybe that is why I get along with them so well. They are here to help us transform. Sun at my back, warmth in the cold Spring air, I am here to change and to change the world along with me.

If you would like to talk about how I could help you connect to the plants to creatively own your own transformation, you can schedule a free exploratory session with me. I’d love to talk to about how you are feeling your Earth connection in this sensual season and what kind of expression this connection is asking of you.

I made two essences at the New Moon yesterday, Dandelion - my long time ally and supportive friend - and Bleeding Heart who gave me the following lines (we’d been communing about the transformative power of heartbreak over the dark moon week which was quite emotional for me):

My bleeding heart
bleeding all over
onto the ground
healing and feeding the soil
my bleeding heart healing the soul
a white drop from pink
fertile milk of heartbreak
seeding change
and transformation.

And I’ll leave you with that.

You can read more flower essence messages in my shop on this website. A good way to browse: click on the picture of the first image which draws you in when you look at the page. I’m sure the message of the flower will speak right to you, clearly.

I hope you had a wonderful May Day - Beltane- Easter or however you choose to celebrate this season of change. Stay open and loving and I hope to connect with you soon.

Tender and Fierce: Aries Season, My Pointy Green Shoes and a Story for the New Moon

Spring is tender. Spring is fierce.

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Cicely Mary Barker

Walking through the world I’ve been feeling these two contradictory sensations of Spring in the world. But are they so contradictory? To break through something, you need a certain fierceness in your green newness. The buds of leaves I love, in their tender green, must break through harder protective layers with life force. The “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drive the Flower” is not a passive poem. The butterfly’s tender wings must break through the cocoon. It’s violent, and Spring has its violence too. It’s fierce, in like a lion, and tender, out like a lamb. March is my birthday month and I remember birth has its violence too, a radical transition. I came through in breech position, butt first. I feel held by these two forces as I walk the world, fierce and tender always.

I Walked Home In Its Light

The recent planetary line-up has been intense. The Equinox coincided with the Full moon in Libra and I walked home in its light, the flowers in the night still growing towards the light, reaching, ready, not yet open, waiting. Excited! Effervescent. I felt giddy and then angry and frustrated. Aries season. Head first with horns then abruptly blocked, for there is still more to work with, let go of, move around. But with the Equinox there is courage and belief in the new season. I am taking Hibiscus flower essence, red and pink, faith and confidence, a perfect message for now. Pluto on the South Node seems to be squaring everything and I feel like I’m in the depths of deep transformation.

Pointy Green Suede Shoes

Speaking of violence and tenderness, I feel like growing up is often a process of muting our tender love for self, and that this is often learned between girls as they grow. In seventh grade I had a pair of pointy green suede shoes. I really loved these shoes and I felt like they expressed the essence of myself. They were soft and comfortable, they smelled good. I loved wearing them and I loved looking at my feet in them. I must have been doing just that when a girl at school called me out on it. “What are you doing, are you staring at your shoes?!?” and I immediately stopped and felt guilty for having shown that I loved this part of myself, those pointy green elf shoes that I identified with so much. I can remember other instances of this girl on girl criticism, in the ballet school changing room, in the classroom when you had to pretend you weren’t so smart. It was normal and cool to criticize your own body, it was expected to belittle yourself. None of us were ever beautiful enough. It seems so strange to think about now. There is a price to pay for enforced humility. But is this even humility?

Humility, But A True Humility

I went to look at what the stars had to tell me. The therapist I see who works on archetypes and story with me brought to my attention the story of Cassiopeia, the proud queen who thinks herself more beautiful than all other women, a bit like the evil stepmother in Snow White. She is a big W in the sky, easily identifiable, one of the ones I always see, sometimes called the Throne. This Queen is so vain she thinks herself more beautiful than her daughter Andromeda, and she tells the sea god that her beauty outshines that of his Nereid wife. This enrages the god and he punishes her by flooding her kingdom, telling her that the only way to save it is to sacrifice her daughter to a sea monster. She attaches Andromeda to a rock on the coast, but Perseus the Solar Hero rescues her. He then proceeds to punish the Queen, transforming her into stone by showing her a hideous head that he draws out of a bag. She’s silent now, in the sign of Aries. Maybe the lesson she teaches is humility, but a true humility, not one that puts yourself and others down because you have to hide that you secretly want to be the best. Also she’s really scared of aging and death, but all this does is petrify her, literally.

I Told The Story To The New Moon. I Think She Liked It.

Story can help you identify the tyrannical aspects of your shadow so that they release some of their control, and I feel more at peace with this un-self-loving part of myself as I sit in this story. I told the story to the New Moon. I think she liked it.

This is the last post I will be updating here! If you want to keep following me, head over to www.enosburghessences.com and put your name and email in the little box so you can get on my mailing list. I’ll send you my cosmic updates and news of my offerings as they develop. For now, you can schedule a free exploratory meeting with me to discover how we could work together with the plants to open up your creative flow channels or anything else you want to talk about (contact me if the times don’t work, I’ve only put morning hours but I’m still in Europe so this will be a problem for US friends – amy@enosburghessences.com) or you can book an energy healing treatment. Flower essences will be available in my store on there soon.

I hope you are all feeling the motivation to be more truly yourselves, to move forward with the spring, and to appreciate every living green thing!

March New Moon and Mercury Retrograde in Pisces: Back Pain, A Bad Tooth and 8 Piscean Self-Care Practices

Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi

My neck and back have been hurting for days and I have been working on my past. The backs of our bodies: this is where we carry our past so it can be useful, if there is pain there, to look at the memories or weight from that past that you are carrying. It can be heavy and I like to use EFT tapping to release it. This time I realize I am still carrying, among other things, an old story of childhood pain which has resulted in a very basic feeling of not liking myself. I purge it again. I know this is a very common human feeling so I wanted to address it here. I wonder how we learn it.

How Did We Get Here?

From the point of view of a river or a plant, it is completely ridiculous to not like yourself. For animals, it also makes no sense; it is counter-intuitive to survival. How could a deer not like itself? It's in the moment, being a deer. A dog could perhaps appear to not like itself, but I think they just learn it from us. We are animals: how did we lose touch with our survival instinct and come to hate ourselves? There are probably many books on this, and I've probably read and forgotten some of them, but I would like to know, how did we make a world in which we are so sick with dislike for ourselves that we are destroying the very planet we live on? How did we get here?

Self-Hate As A Coping Mechanism

A coping mechanism. A kind of protection. When you are small, you cannot control your surroundings and many of our surroundings are not conducive to supporting the life of something small. When I was born, I had three siblings and two parents, all of whom were more or less going about their life. I was an element within, an object of this family scenario. I was not born ready to step off and lean into my life once I had learned safely how to walk. I was picked up, put down, and since our rhythms as a society are off, often the rhythms we impose on children are off. I remember it feeling awful. So we are born but some of us, upon arrival, don't want to be here, which turns into not wanting to be alive which of course then we have to repress because you are not supposed to be alive and not want to be alive, so maybe the self-hate is a kind of coping mechanism, a form of self-protection in this world that we only half want to be in. Maybe we can't bear this feeling of not really wanting to be alive unless we justify it by hating ourselves. I wish we acted more like our animal selves.

It Is Time To Dig Down Into It

I think my back pain might actually be an infection in an old root canal I need to see to. The story of that tooth: once almost twenty years ago I got a cavity and I consulted a dentist I didn't know very well who filled it with a composite filling. A few years later, when I was in a diner, I bit into a piece of plastic in my coleslaw and the composite filling fell out and I had to get a root canal. I guess these things happen, but I think the cavity was probably too big to have been filled with composite. Anyways, bad dentist or not, the root canal itself was a terrible experience. I asked for a gold crown to be placed on top of it, to make it a little less terrible and have some gold in my mouth. This tooth has been bothering me for a while but I haven't paid attention to it and so the alive-dead tooth may be harboring an infection. I think this may be causing my neck to be stiff, which is a lot like how my alive-dead being in the world doesn't allow me to move about in my life easily. So it is time to dig down into it, or perhaps remove the tooth. My bad tooth is a good symbol for the parts of my past that are heavy and I need to let go of. Or it's like my self-loathing. I thought I needed a gold crown to be worth something.

I Go Back To The Stars And Think

How can one remove the tooth of ones' dislike for oneself? I'm not sure the metaphor works. I go back to the stars and think, this is just a time of falling away. This new moon in Pisces introduced us to the end of times as we float along in a haze. Well, it made me disoriented anyways, but maybe because I'm a Pisces and a Neptunian-Uranian, a Lemurian and a Pleiadian (look those last two up for some very strange youtube transmissions that always resonate with me). I'm actually not sure where I'm from but you can probably be glad you are not as confused about it as I am. It's not even the new moon anymore and I'm a week late with my new moon blog. Well, I've been dealing with this back pain, and other things. For one, Mercury just went retrograde in Pisces and Mercury is really confused in Pisces. He wanders around and just wants to lie down, a bit like I've been doing, staring at the stars and talking to plants.

Don’t Reject Yourself

Self-rejection. I once had a dance teacher who would say, as we danced, don't reject yourself. I couldn't even tell you how she knew I was doing it. It must have been in my movements. I always felt like she was reading some secret part of me that not even I could see. But as soon as she said it, I knew it was true, I was rejecting myself. Sometimes now I catch myself and tell myself not to do it.

Self-Care For People Who Don’t Really Like Themselves

So here are my 8 suggested self-care practices, especially good for the current astrological climate, from the heart of a true piscean, for people who, half the time, don't really like themselves:

1. Feel the comfort and support which is continually offered to your body by gravity. Feel how your back rests on the bed. Feel how your feet are held by the ground.

2. Take a bath. Take baths. Bless the water as it blesses you. If you feel bad about using too much water, think of the water you are blessing going back out into the world to bring transformation and healing. When you let the water out, stay in the bath and imagine you are letting go of whatever you want to let go of. Feel how nice and heavy with gravity you are afterwards.

3. Go slow. Walk slow. Eat slow. Move as little as you want to.

4. Go see your counselors, healers, therapists, doctors and dentists. You may need some help learning how to like yourself. With any luck, the person you go see may like him or herself a bit more than you like you. This will help you learn how to do it.

5. Don't send that message. You know the one. There have been two of them for me in the last 24 hours. Block the person or just sit tight with your opinions until you feel less reactive about the offenses that have been done to you, now and in the past. Other people often don't help you like yourself (unless they are one of the helpers listed in #4, but even then), especially when you lash out at them.

6. Actually, spend as little amount of time in front of screens as possible. This will also allow you to avoid having to deal with #5.

7. Make a list of your desires. Make a list of your fears. Notice how, most of the time, they cancel each other out. Contemplate that for a while. Take the time to write it all out.

8. Talk a walk, preferably near water. This will help you feel peaceful and composed even though you would rather be a fish swimming in the depths, waiting for spring. Content yourself with imagining that you are a fish.

Also Waiting For Spring

I think we are all a bit like fish at this time anyways, so the last one shouldn't be so hard. This means I'll have extra company as I go about my pre and post birthday days, in various moods, also waiting for spring.

I'm taking Hibiscus flower essence, for Faith (everything is going just as it should) and Sandalwood, for Grounded Spirituality, and Self-Heal, for my stiff neck and for Mercury retrograde. I'm also taking lots of vitamins and using these amazing new plant message oracle cards that I love. Remember, the plants only know how to love themselves, because doing anything else is just insanity.

Take care my fellow fish! I hope you find your joy in this sometimes disorienting sea.

Much love,

Amy

(Originally posted March 11, 2019

From Bones to Air: The New Moon Portal of Imbolc

I’m a bit late writing this, sitting at my friend’s kitchen table in Edinburgh and trying to taste the sap to be drawn from the last few weeks, so rich in felt experience, of the interior and the exterior. I’ve had so little time to sit and process and write. How will it all come out?

Seeds Of Love Planted In My Heart

There are themes that go with the new moon in Aquarius, which happened a few days ago: a new surety in my bones, more refined mental patterns, deeper breathing, seeds of love planted in my heart. A new understanding of the two that is one and the one that needs three, as if I can taste the falseness of duality. Here we are, fish flipping around in the dark, where the light becomes itself more deeply in shadow.

Walking Through Land and Myth to a New Place

The wind is blowing and the magpies are not perching. I’ve been searching, walking through land and myth to a new place. I don’t know what it looks like yet. My recent path has been as varied as it was transformational. I went from barefoot and warm, hibiscus blossoms at the full moon, to winter and windy and cold in the city, the litter and pollution fading away into country roads and hedgerows, a story of three star crossed lovers from Ireland, then heading fast and sharply north, through the hills and finally the sea for a frozen new moon of shared song. Well accompanied, I found traveling through the landscape deeply moving, feeling I changed with it as I went along, reflecting, reflecting, not thinking too much. Reflecting on the outside as a reflection of what is within.

The Magpie

At a weekend intensive with Martin Shaw in Devon, I learned that the magpie, a storyteller like Hermes, offers a third way, the blue feather in between the white and black. I realized that all my desires have been divine, coming from another time, as if I had been watching and waiting, hoping to catch from before an earlier, animal longing that I was in touch with, that could not survive in today’s world. There was great relief and a realization of my innocence in all of it. I remembered all the burned witches, felt their longing as also mine, a longing for a better world, like Joan of Arc with her belief in men and strong conviction that she herself had been sent to restore peace and righteousness. It was not her fault that the world was not ready to welcome her vision. There is peace in this knowing, belief in right action, which comes from true intention, in Ghandi’s vision of non-violence. Stepping into this vast longing, it feels spacious. I can stretch out here.

I Was Not Alone

All these realizations were helped along by my conversations with companions along the way. I was not alone. On a morning walk in Devon I was accompanied by a few precious stars, a first quarter moon. I found the mother oak, sat at the foot of a cedar, scared some birds, found my path with my toes, didn’t feel much fear and heard the Earth thumping in my bones. I talked to Snowdrop, Oak, Cedar, Willow. I remembered the song of Rosemary. I rode in trains and cars and shared with an amazing woman from South Africa and an Indian storyteller that lives in Glasgow; I crossed paths with new and old friends who I drank and ate with. They hosted me and helped me find my way.

Sang Into My Bones, Sang Into All Our Bones

On Imbolc, in Findhorn, Scotland, where I went to sing for a week with my teacher Frank Kane, I felt the first glimmer of spring and sang to carrot seeds, gifted my blood to the flowers, felt into the layers of my body and sang into my bones, sang into all our bones. I have the feeling that I have been moving through different layers of the world, the historical and the mythical as well as the earthly and material, from bones to air, as I have been moving through these different layers of myself. The strangest feeling, as if I had strings of words running through my arms and legs, rivers of meaning, all going somewhere, coming from somewhere, running through me like stories, with something to say. It feels like there is no going back now, no forgetting these layers. I’ll build with them, we’ll build with them, until, brick by brick, with our words and silences, a new world forms. I’m stepping through the portal, feeling my cells rearrange themselves, following the glimpse of a glimmer of blue.

Happy New Year of the Earth Pig to you!

(Originally posted February 8, 2019)